Tuesday, January 29, 2008

Brazil nuts, or "the origin of women"

I have been mislead my entire life.
There are interesting mythological ideas on the origin of women. In an early part of the Mundurucd creation cycle, human beings are already present in the world. The culture hero and creator, named Karusakaibo, lived among the people with a handsome young son, named Korumtau. Despite Karusakaibo's prohibition, the women all seduced his son, leading the angry father to turn him into a tapir. Undaunted, the women copulated with the tapir until one day the men found out and killed the animal. The enraged women then marched single file to the river, where they turned into fish. The world was left without women. Later, Karusakaibo and his trickster friend, Daiiru the armadillo, found an underworld and pulled out of it the people from whom the Mundurucu are sprung. But there were only men among these human beings, and Karusakaibo proceeded to make women out of clay. The various animals of the forest copulated with the women, and the different sizes and shapes of their penises account for the differences now found in the vagina. The armadillo finished the work by smearing a bit of rotten Brazil nut on the mouth of each vagina, which is why the female organ smells the way it does today.

All those tales about being created from a rib or of evolving from monkeys . . . NOT TRUE, ladies.

Carly burst in here with her laptop before; we're both taking the same anthropology class and the above excerpt was from our reading assignment. We were both highly amused, and a mature, meaningful discussion about Brazil nuts ensued. Obv.

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